Environment variables work extremely well when deploying on Heroku [1]. You can't exactly commit a local_settings.py file to your repo, so setting env variables

Environment variables work extremely well when deploying on Heroku [1]. You can't exactly commit a local_settings.py file to your repo, so setting env variables is the only way to exclude sensitive keys and passwords from your source control. [1] http://rdegges.com/devops-django-part-3-the-heroku-way http://rdegges.com/devops-django-part-3-the-heroku-way